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She had nothing to rush home for so yes, she said, a spot of lunch would be nice. She noticed how Jonah put the drinks down on the table, how he carefully pulled back his chair to sit down, and she unconsciously compared it to how Bruce jerked and dragged, banged and slammed everything. It was as if every action he made had to have a soundtrack: throwing cutlery into the sink, ramming platesin the dishwasher. She remembered that Jonah, young as he was, had treated objects with as much care as he did people. The same could also be said for Bruce.
They gave their order to the waitress and then sat in a contemplative silence for a while until Jonah asked her if she was all right.
‘Just a bit of memory lane overload,’ she replied. ‘Graves freak me out a bit, to be honest. I’d rather imagine Denny’s ashes being carried by the air, travelling all over the world to beautiful places than him lying there still for eternity.’
‘He’s not there, Shay,’ replied Jonah with a soft smile. ‘He couldn’t sit still for five minutes if you remember. I’m sure he’ll be up a tree somewhere looking at birds’ nests, recording his data.’
Shay smiled back. Denny had a small book that he carried with him everywhere, recording the birds he’d spotted, the nests he’d found – not that he ever interfered with them. Then he’d go home and write everything up neatly in a large desk diary. She bought him one for Christmas once and he’d liked it so much, she’d given him one every year from then on. Putting his thoughts to paper was probably what kept him sane living in that madhouse, she’d come to think. Had he been around today, he would have had hundreds of photos on his phone of flora and fauna; a total nature nerd.
‘Tell me,’ asked Jonah, as their food arrived. ‘You mentioned that why you came back had something to do with a skip.’
Shay rolled her eyes. ‘Mum’s memory had been slipping for a couple of years and her neighbours were having some building work done and had a skip delivered with the name Sharif on the side. It acted like a key in her mind to a verydusty room, churned all sorts of things up that she’d tried to forget and plaster over, pretend they didn’t happen.’
‘Like the notes and the letter I sent.’
‘Yes. But you can’t overwrite unfinished business so easily, I learned that for myself. I got married on the date when Denny died, hoping I’d have something else to think about whenever it came round.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Maybe a little, but it was always there, in the background. What happened to us bled into my whole life, my choices.’ She took a sip of orange juice, wet her throat. ‘I could have gone to university, but I told my parents I didn’t want to. The truth was it didn’t feel right to go when Denny didn’t have the chance.’
Jonah listened patiently, his food untouched.
‘I couldn’t feel anything for a long time. I was a proper nutjob. Then I ended up meeting someone who got past my barrier and I was very grateful for that because it made me feel normal.’ She both said it and realised it at the same time. Yes, grateful, that was what she had felt most of all.
‘The man you married?’
‘And the man I’m about to divorce.’
‘Why did you split up?’
‘He had an affair with my best friend who’d just won twelve million pounds on the lottery. He blames me for driving him into her arms.’ She laughed at the absurdity of it and it coaxed out a laugh from Jonah too, for which he apologised.
‘Part of his accusation must be true. It’s never all one and not the other,’ Shay said. ‘I think we just lost each other along the way; habit slid into the place where love oncewas.’ She cringed then, preparing to admit her misdemeanour. ‘On a subconscious level though, I’m obviously not as willing to accept blame, as I appear to have drawn a rather large knob on my divorce papers under the influence of Co-op Chenin Blanc. I’m quite ashamed that I can’t remember doing it, either.’
Jonah threw back his head and laughed.
‘Shay Corrigan, you’re as much of a tonic as you ever were,’ he said.
‘Tell me about your children while I eat my burger.’ He squashed it down with his palm before picking it up from the plate. ‘My daughter is… is spirited, bonkers, a little lost I think. A mass of contradictions. Very bright, leggy and beautiful, terrible choice in boys. I wish she’d find out where she belonged.’
‘She will, I’m sure,’ said Jonah. ‘What about your son?’
‘Gentle, quiet, very artistic. I worry about him most of all because I can’t see into his head and I worry about my daughter because Icansee into her head.’
‘I felt like that with Chloe – my niece. There was always a part of me that worried she wasn’t as happy as she appeared and I felt anxious for her. That’s a legacy we’ve both inherited, I think,’ said Jonah. He understood in a way that Bruce never could.
‘Do your kids look like you, with your Italian ancestry?’ A teasing smile.
Shay cleared her mouth of a giant lump of scampi before responding to that one.
‘Turns out the Italian ancestry story is exactly that – a story. I recently found out that Harry Corrigan isn’t my dad. My mother met my real father when she was teaching Russian in the 1970s. He was an officer in the Egyptianarmy intelligence corps and they had an affair. He died when she was pregnant with me.’ Condensed to a few sentences, the truth about her heritage sounded more of a lie than the lie was.Lies beget lies beget lies,she thought to herself as she saw Jonah’s expression of disbelief.
‘In the past couple of months I have lost my husband, my best friend, my mother, lost my father and found a new one that I’ll never know,’ Shay went on. The nearest she could ever get to him was through the scraps of notes in the book Dagmara had given her and the drawing he had done of Roberta.
‘That’s a lot to contend with,’ said Jonah, reiterating, ‘A lot.’
‘I needed to get away and give my head some breathing space.’
